NASA’s new image and video library is searchable and mobile-friendly

NASA has spent decades pushing the bounds of human innovation and exploration, and it’s documented every second of it in excruciating detail. Finding all those images and videos used to be a pain, but no more. NASA has announced a new searchable version of its public Image and Video Library. You can visit it right now and get access to more than 140,000 NASA images, videos, and audio files.

The available media covers more than space missions. There’s content from NASA’s endeavors in aeronautics, astrophysics, Earth science, and of course, human spaceflight. The site scales properly to desktop and mobile devices now. Just enter some text in the search box at the top and you can find all the content related to your keywords. There’s also a “newest uploads” and “most popular” section of the site for easy access without searching. When performing a search, the NASA library includes filters for images, videos, and audio. You can also narrow your search by year with a slider on the left.

Most of the content available on the revamped NASA site are images. Each one has the original EXIF data preserved. That means you can see interesting metrics about the exposure, lens, focal length, and more. The page for each image includes linked keywords, which you can use to immediately launch a new search and find similar images. Should you decide to download something, the site makes multiple resolution versions available. There’s a caption file for each image as well.

This isn’t every piece of multimedia data NASA has collected over the years, but there’s still a lot. NASA plans to add more content over time using an automated image upload API developed for the Image and Video Library.

Here are a couple particularly cool things we found in NASA’s archives.